On Aug 14, 2010, at 11:30 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
Question: Why does it cost $11 million or more per year (going to some $22 million per year after 2013) to run a couple of databases that are Internet-accessible?
Patrick - If this is a reference to ARIN, the budget is approximately $15M annually, and is not substantially changing any faster than expected for normal cost-of-living trends (If $22M is a reference to having both IPv4 and IPv6 fees, ARIN charges each organization only once for the larger of IPv4 or IPv6 registration services fee it makes use of) Even so, it's a fair question to ask why it costs $15M annual to run ARIN. That includes the costs for many tasks which might not be obvious, including running the legacy registry system (which handles SWIP email templates), the new ARIN Online system (which is quite a bit more elegant), the public WHOIS servers, bulk WHOIS and FTP services, IN-ADDR services, the public web sites, the polling & election systems, the billing/invoicing systems, and the staging, development/QA support for same, and the normal office infrastructure for things like email, mailing lists, replication, business record keeping, and archival. There's some engineering staff to keep all that running, registration services staff to handle incoming requests, member services for running the meetings, elections, and policy process, and outreach thats already been mentioned with respect to trade shows and press, but also includes engagement with our friends at the ITU, international bodies, and governments. The full budget is available in each year's annual report along with the audited financials, and can be found here: https://www.arin.net/about_us/corp_docs/annual_rprt.html Clearly, the budget can be increased or decreased based on the services desired by the community, and this typically discussed on the last day of the ARIN Public Policy & Member meeting (twice yearly) during the Financial Services report. In between meetings, this topic is probably best suited for the arin-discuss mailing list as opposed to the nanog list. FYI, /John John Curran President and CEO ARIN